The work places a large (2.5 metre) LED type digit on the
wall. The seven segments of the digit are acoustic rather
than visual indicators, and emit sounds which are switched
to coincide with the counting of this giant number, the
familiar 7 segment digit is thus experienced as an auditory
phenomenon instead of a visual one. Mounted on a column
facing the wall is a large light emitting digit, counting
in time with the acoustic digit.
‘Sponsored by the time’ takes as its starting
point Steve Reich’s 1965 composition ‘Come
Out’ in which the words ‘come out to show
them’ are repeated and layered until they are
relieved of their signification and become abstract sound
elements.
My choice of an excerpt from the speaking clock
announcement (The full text of which is “at the third
stroke the time sponsored by Accurist will be ten fifty
precisely”) was derived from the notion that, after
18 years of Thatcherism everything, even the time, can be
commodified and sponsored.
The LED digit’s seven segments which, by convention,
are identified by the letters A-G, are used to voice
versions of this same phrase, tuned to the appropriate
notes of the musical scale, thus forming a series of chords
and discords as well as allowing the emergence of secondary
and tertiary rhythms as the voices phase in and out of
synchrony.